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Monday, 10 October 2011

Monday review: Children's iPhone Apps

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I was offered a chance to try out for free a couple of children's iPhone apps. The ones I asked to try out were My First JCB and Postman Pat's Special Delivery Service. Both of these are aimed at younger children so I let both my 4 and 7 year old test them out. First up Postman Pat as the idea for him originated in Kendal before his debut 30 years ago. We had one little problem when we first started as my daughter's full name was too long for the name field! She has a 9 letter name and it only accepts 8... Once we got past this it was on to the main menu:

A useful feature is the sound mute button so the theme music isn't constantly playing. There are a variety of games each allowing a choice of Easy, Medium or Hard. The instructions are included before you start but on the iPhone the writing was quite small and my 7 year old found it hard to read. All the games are pretty simple to operate once an adult has given the first instruction. This would probably keep a child entertained happily for quite sometime. It does need quite a firm touch to ensure that the games work. The more the children complete the more stickers they get for the central puzzle game so it encourages them to do more.Then we tried My 1st JCB as an alternative. This again included a range of games for the children to choose from:

Unfortunately I couldn't find out where to turn the sound off on these games! They are all pretty simple and the instructions are available from a ? icon in each one. The text on these was larger than in the Postman Pat one. As there was no way of saving progress there isn't the same incentive to keep going back into it.

My 7 year old prefers the Postman Pat games and my 4 year old hasn't really shown too much interest in going back to play them again.